Student Major Analysis Example

The Student Major Analysis Example is an interactive dashboard detailing the majors of college students in a 16 year time span utilizing InetSoft's cutting-edge business intelligence software. Focusing on numerous majors from different years, this dashboard clearly portrays the statistics with a visually pleasing chart along with a detailed data sheet showing the information with text. Furthermore, along with other data sets, the specific chart below allows users to filter by different majors. This helps improve the analyzation process when digging for specific information. More importantly, InetSoft's solution is easy to use and navigate so that organization members can all have access to the tools and capabilities as well.

With InetSoft's point-and-click environment, users can efficiently and effectively build powerful analytical tools like this one to monitor and easily visualize statistical data. Not only does this enhance everyday business procedures, but also helps record any significant data that may be beneficial for future use.

How Oxford University Switched from Oracle BI to StyleBI for Dashboards, Analytics, and Reporting

For centuries, Oxford University has been a symbol of intellectual rigor and innovation. Yet, even institutions steeped in tradition must evolve technologically to remain efficient, transparent, and adaptive in an increasingly data-driven world. The university’s recent transition from Oracle BI to StyleBI for its dashboards, analytics, and reporting ecosystem marks one of its most significant modernization efforts in information management. The move was not merely a software replacement — it represented a shift in philosophy toward open architecture, greater accessibility, and a more democratized approach to data exploration across departments, colleges, and research centers.

For years, Oxford had relied on Oracle BI as its core business intelligence platform. The system supported financial reporting, research grant tracking, student analytics, and administrative decision-making. While powerful, Oracle BI had become increasingly cumbersome. License costs, slow development cycles, and complex data model dependencies created friction between IT and end-users. Moreover, as the university’s data landscape expanded to include cloud applications, research repositories, and cross-departmental collaborations, Oracle BI’s monolithic architecture could not easily scale or connect to the evolving web of sources. These challenges led to fragmented reporting workflows and growing dissatisfaction among administrators and researchers alike.

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The Decision to Modernize

The university’s IT leadership began exploring alternatives that could address key pain points: reducing total cost of ownership, improving self-service analytics, enabling real-time data access, and supporting hybrid on-premise and cloud architectures. A cross-departmental evaluation team, composed of representatives from finance, academic administration, research services, and IT governance, was tasked with identifying a platform that would serve both technical and non-technical users. After extensive analysis, Oxford selected StyleBI for its combination of open-source flexibility, lightweight architecture, and full-spectrum support for data preparation, dashboarding, and embedded analytics.

StyleBI’s licensing model was particularly attractive. Unlike Oracle BI’s complex user-based licensing and high maintenance costs, StyleBI offered a scalable subscription model that aligned better with the university’s budget cycles and distributed structure. Each college, department, and research center could deploy its own analytics environment under a unified governance framework without incurring additional per-user licensing fees. This model enabled Oxford to extend data access to thousands of academic and administrative users who had previously been excluded due to licensing constraints.

Technical Motivations Behind the Move

From a technical standpoint, Oxford’s IT architects identified several limitations in Oracle BI that StyleBI addressed elegantly. Oracle BI required dedicated infrastructure and frequent patching, making upgrades slow and resource-intensive. Its ETL processes depended on centralized data warehouses, leading to data latency issues that frustrated users needing near-real-time insight. In contrast, StyleBI’s lightweight mashup engine allowed Oxford to connect directly to live data sources — including Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL Server, Salesforce, Workday, and various research systems — without heavy data movement or replication.

This direct-connect capability was crucial for the university’s research administration teams. Research funding often flows across multiple systems — from proposal submissions in one system, to finance records in another, to project deliverables in yet another. With StyleBI, Oxford could combine those sources on-the-fly into unified dashboards tracking grant applications, award utilization, and compliance metrics. The real-time nature of these dashboards meant that deans and department heads could monitor active grants and financial balances without waiting for nightly refreshes or manual Excel reconciliations.

Building Dashboards That Serve Every Stakeholder

One of the defining features of Oxford’s StyleBI deployment was its emphasis on inclusivity — making data approachable and actionable for all levels of the university. The central IT team, working alongside academic departments, created a suite of core dashboards serving key functions:

• Financial Oversight Dashboards: These dashboards consolidated data from Oracle ERP and local departmental ledgers to track budget variance, expenditure trends, and fund utilization. Faculty administrators could drill down from university-level KPIs to transaction-level details for specific projects.
• Student Analytics Dashboards: Admissions, enrollment, and retention metrics were unified into a visual environment where deans could examine patterns by program, geography, and demographic attributes. Predictive models helped identify at-risk students early in the academic cycle.
• Research and Grant Management Dashboards: By integrating finance, compliance, and performance data, these dashboards gave principal investigators an end-to-end view of their projects — from funding milestones to deliverable progress.
• Facilities and Sustainability Dashboards: The Estates team utilized IoT integrations to monitor energy consumption, maintenance schedules, and building utilization, helping Oxford advance its sustainability goals.

StyleBI’s interactive filtering and drill-through features transformed how users explored data. Non-technical staff who once relied on IT to produce static Oracle BI reports could now self-navigate through dashboards, customizing views, applying filters, and exporting insights independently. This shift to self-service analytics freed IT resources for more strategic tasks and fostered a data-literate culture across the university.

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Integration and Data Governance

Transitioning from Oracle BI to StyleBI required careful planning to maintain data integrity and governance standards. Oxford’s IT team built a semantic layer within StyleBI that mirrored key elements of Oracle BI’s subject areas, ensuring continuity for users transitioning between systems. The team also implemented data catalogs and lineage tracking to maintain transparency around source systems, transformation logic, and access controls.

StyleBI’s integration with Oxford’s identity management system allowed role-based access to sensitive information. For example, financial dashboards were restricted to authorized finance officers, while research grant dashboards were accessible to principal investigators and department heads. This governance model balanced transparency with security — a critical factor in a decentralized institution with thousands of users and complex data-sharing policies.

The migration also offered an opportunity to simplify data models. Years of incremental customization had left Oracle BI cluttered with redundant objects and outdated reports. During the migration, Oxford’s data architects consolidated these into a streamlined set of curated datasets within StyleBI. As a result, the reporting environment became cleaner, faster, and easier to maintain, with fewer dependencies on IT intervention.

Performance and User Experience Gains

Once StyleBI was fully deployed, users noticed immediate improvements in performance and accessibility. Dashboards that once took minutes to load under Oracle BI now refreshed in seconds. The browser-based interface of StyleBI required no desktop installations, enabling easy access from laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. For faculty members and researchers working off-campus, this was a game changer — they could securely access dashboards through the university’s web portal without VPN bottlenecks or plug-ins.

Beyond performance, StyleBI’s modern visualization options elevated the aesthetic and interpretive quality of Oxford’s reporting. Interactive charts, heatmaps, and timeline visualizations replaced the static tabular reports that had dominated Oracle BI. This shift helped users grasp trends and correlations more intuitively, supporting more informed decisions at every level of the organization. For instance, academic departments could visualize application-to-admission conversion ratios over time, overlayed with funding trends, to shape future recruitment strategies.

Cultural Transformation and Training

Technology upgrades rarely succeed without cultural alignment, and Oxford’s IT governance board recognized that early. The StyleBI implementation included a comprehensive training program designed to elevate data literacy across the university community. Workshops and online modules taught staff and faculty how to interpret visual data, design their own dashboards, and adopt a consistent vocabulary for KPIs and metrics. These sessions emphasized practical use cases — from tracking departmental finances to analyzing grant proposals — ensuring relevance and adoption across diverse academic contexts.

The training initiative also created a network of “Data Champions” within each department — individuals who acted as local analytics advocates and first-line support. This decentralized model reduced IT bottlenecks and cultivated a grassroots sense of ownership over data quality and usage. Over time, StyleBI became not just a reporting tool but a collaborative environment for evidence-based decision-making.

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Strategic Outcomes and Benefits

The impact of Oxford’s migration to StyleBI extended far beyond technical gains. Financially, the university reduced its BI operating costs by nearly 40%, freeing resources for academic innovation and student services. Decision cycles shortened dramatically: monthly financial reviews were replaced by live dashboards accessible anytime. Transparency increased, as senior leadership could monitor departmental KPIs in real time and identify early warning signs of budget overruns or underutilized funds.

Academically, the new analytics ecosystem supported more sophisticated planning and assessment. For instance, by integrating academic performance data with student services and demographic profiles, StyleBI dashboards helped identify systemic inequities and optimize support interventions. Similarly, research administrators could track interdisciplinary collaborations and funding success rates, enabling data-informed strategies for grant applications.

Equally significant was the empowerment of end users. The freedom to build custom dashboards and reports encouraged innovation at the departmental level. Some colleges began developing specialized dashboards for library usage analytics, alumni engagement, and course evaluation summaries — all using the same governed data model. The result was a consistent yet flexible analytics landscape, where local creativity flourished within a unified data governance framework.